How Being Gay Shaped My Relationship With Fitness

This article reflects my personal experience. I can’t speak for every gay person, and many will have had very different experiences. But these are some of the ways being gay influenced my relationship with exercise and fitness growing up.

When people talk about why they struggle with fitness, the reasons are usually obvious.

Lack of time. Lack of motivation. Poor habits. Not knowing where to start.

But recently, during Pride Month, I’ve been reflecting on something else that shaped my relationship with exercise: being gay.

Even writing that feels strange.

I’m not trying to blame my sexuality for being overweight, nor am I looking for excuses. The truth is that being gay didn’t stop me from getting fit. But it did influence how I felt about exercise, gyms and sporting environments for a large part of my life.

Looking back, I can see that it made the journey harder than it needed to be.

PE Was Never About Sport

For many people, PE is their first experience of exercise, for me, it was the part of school I dreaded most.

It wasn’t because I hated sport itself. It was because I knew I was gay.

PE meant changing rooms, locker room conversations, and spending an hour in an environment where I constantly felt exposed. The conversations were always the same: girls, football, who’s the fastest or strongest.

I had no interest in any of it.

The worst moments weren’t the sports themselves. It was when the attention turned towards me and someone asked who I fancied or tried to pull me into a conversation I desperately wanted to avoid.

Most people who grew up closeted will understand this feeling. My goal wasn’t to stand out. It was the exact opposite. I wanted to blend in and avoid drawing attention to myself.

So I did what many teenagers do when they’re uncomfortable: I disengaged.

I put in minimal effort. I avoided team sports where possible. I tried not to be noticed.

Without realising it, I started associating exercise with stress, anxiety and embarrassment rather than enjoyment.

It’s sad to think that because of those experiences, I didn’t seriously engage with fitness until my early twenties.

The Gym Felt Like Another Masculine Space

By the time I became an adult, I was carrying all of those feelings into gym environments.

When most people picture a gym, they picture a masculine space. Heavy weights. Strong men. Confidence.

For someone already uncomfortable in male-dominated environments, that can feel intimidating.

I spoke in a previous post about gym intimidation, and for me it wasn’t just about not knowing what exercises to do. It was also about feeling like I didn’t belong there.

There was always an irrational fear that people would somehow know I was gay and judge me for it.

As an adult, I know how unlikely that sounds. Most people genuinely don’t care.

But fears don’t have to be rational to feel real.

Even now, there can still be awkward moments. Someone asks if I have a wife or girlfriend. I correct them. The conversation pauses for a second. Then everyone moves on.

Yet for years, I built those moments up in my head far more than anyone else ever did.

The irony is that gyms are full of gay men. The physiques celebrated within the gay community don’t appear by accident.

But that creates another challenge.

Body Image and the Gay Community

Body image is a complicated topic for many people, but I think it can be particularly intense for gay men.

Spend enough time on dating apps and social media and you’ll see endless images of perfect physiques. Lean bodies. Six-packs. Huge chests. Perfect lighting, they may be headless torsos though.

It’s easy to start believing that’s the standard.

When you’re already insecure about your body, those images don’t inspire you. They convince you that you’ll never measure up.

For years, I looked at people who were in incredible shape and saw a gap so large that I didn’t even want to start.

Ironically, fitness became part of the solution to that insecurity, but the insecurity itself was one of the biggest barriers to getting started.

I’ve also often thought about a point made in the book The Velvet Rage.

The book discusses how some gay men spend years feeling different or inadequate and later try to compensate by becoming the most successful, the most attractive, or the most impressive person in the room.

I can see elements of that within fitness culture too.

For some people, building muscle becomes about health and strength.

For others, it becomes proof that they’re finally enough.

Finding Support

One thing that helped me enormously was working with personal trainers when starting at a new gym.

Having someone guide me around the environment removed a lot of the anxiety.

But even then, I sometimes found myself overthinking things.

Would they feel uncomfortable when they found out I was gay?

Would conversations become awkward?

Would they treat me differently?

Looking back, almost all of those fears existed entirely in my own head.

The trainers were focused on helping me improve my squat, not analysing my sexuality.

The Real Barrier

The common theme throughout all of these experiences is that most of the barriers existed internally.

The fear was real.

The anxiety was real.

The discomfort was real.

But many of the judgements I worried about never actually happened.

I was deciding how people would react before giving them the opportunity to react at all.

The uncomfortable truth is that my biggest fear was being judged by others, yet I was judging others first by assuming what they would think of me.

So, Did Being Gay Stop Me Getting Fit?

No.

But it absolutely influenced my relationship with fitness.

It shaped how I viewed exercise as a teenager. It affected how comfortable I felt in gyms. It influenced my confidence, my body image, and how long it took me to fully engage with fitness.

Those experiences made the journey harder.

What they didn’t do was remove my ability to choose what happened next.

At some point, we all reach a stage where we have to decide whether past experiences will continue directing our future choices.

That doesn’t mean ignoring what happened.

It means acknowledging it, understanding it, and then moving forward anyway.

If you’re reading this and you’re nervous about going to the gym because you feel different, out of place, judged, or unwelcome, I understand.

I’ve felt all of those things.

But I’ve also learned that confidence doesn’t arrive before you start.

It arrives because you start.

And the gym isn’t reserved for a certain type of person.

It’s for anyone willing to walk through the door.